Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Windows 7 is nice, but it trashed grub

analysis
Feb 19, 20093 mins

Installing Windows 7 on a system's second disk trashed the grub multi-boot menu on the first disk.

In the continuing saga of setting up my new quad-core box, I’m about halfway down my page-long checklist of tasks. Most of the tasks involve installing software on Vista, but there are a few items involving additional operating systems. It’ll help if you look at the disk layout:

Disk Management

Disk 0 is the 500 GB Samsung SATA II disk that came with the system. Disk 1 is a similar WD disk that I added myself.

The cross-hatched partition to the right of C: holds an Ubuntu Linux x64 8.10 system. When I installed Ubuntu, it recognized the Vista partition and preserved its boot block as an option within a grub boot menu. As Ubuntu updated itself to a new kernel, it extended the grub menu, but left Vista at the bottom. Ubuntu worked well for the short time I used it.

When I installed the Windows 7 beta on Disk 1, I hoped that it would ignore Disk 0 completely. No such luck: it found the Vista boot block, ignored the grub menu, and created a new Windows boot menu for itself and Vista on Disk 0. (I probably should have unplugged the Samsung disk for the installation. Now I think of it.) The Ubuntu ext3 and swap partitions are still there, but I can’t boot to Ubuntu.

I’m sure that there will be a solution to this, perhaps some Ubuntu option or perhaps a 3rd-party boot manager, but I don’t yet know what will work best. Since the next system to go in will be the Windows Server 2008 R2 for x64 beta, which will probably behave like Windows 7 did, I’m going to wait a bit before trying to restore bootability for Ubuntu.

Otherwise, the Windows 7 beta installed without a hitch. It found its system updates and current drivers for all the hardware on the system without any help from me, and is performing well. The only issues I have uncovered besides the grub issue have been with the buggy version of IE 8 that ships with this build. I suspect that this will be fixed in the release candidate, since IE 8 is just fine on my Windows XP SP3 box.

I would have liked to report these two issues to Microsoft, and I tried. However, Microsoft Connect refuses to let me submit my bugs, and also refuses to show me an application for the beta program. You’d think that MSDN members would automatically be able to submit bugs, but apparently not.

If you know a good way to get the multi-boot to include the Linux installation, please let me know.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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